How A 2,300 Year Old Proverb Helped Me Learn Languages

Today I want to share a simple yet profound piece of wisdom that I came across 10 years ago which radically changed me as a learner, especially with languages.

I receive emails and private messages through social media all the time from people who all seem to say they have the same problem – they’ve been learning language X for a long time (in some cases even years) and are still struggling to get real results or reach basic fluency.

Years.

It’s an awfully long time to be chipping away at it and never reaching your goal.

The first question that enters my mind when I hear it is this:

How many months or years of struggling and getting nowhere does it take for you to realise that whatever you’re doing just isn’t working?

The bottom line is, if you’re really working hard at something and not seeing the results then something’s not right about the way you’re tackling it.

And it’s not because you aren’t good at languages.

I’m convinced that every human being is fully capable of learning other languages (with the exception of those who are handicapped of course). It’s an innate function that we’re all born with – we all have the same organs and parts, the same needs, and we’ve all acquired at least one language already.

We’re all able to do it.

If you’re putting in enough effort to learn a foreign language and are motivated to learn, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be achieving the results you’re after.

If you’ve been working away at it for a long time and still aren’t communicating then it’s time to step back and assess what you’re doing.

How a 2,300 year old line of foreign language text radically transformed me into a learning success story

The first two foreign languages I learned as an adult (I don’t count Mandarin as I had to learn it in school) were two dead languages – Koine Greek and Ancient Hebrew.

I’m polyliterate with these languages, which means I fluently read and write them but these varieties aren’t spoken anymore (languages evolve over time after all).

I don’t actually speak Modern Greek or Hebrew yet but I plan to in the near future as my background in these old varieties means that I’m already most of the way there (even more with Hebrew due to its crossover with my Arabic).

I failed my first year in college.

As I said in a previous post, I’ve always been a visual-spatial learner which means that conventional course material and structures are useless to me, so when I first started with Greek I had a really tough time.

Like many people who are learning their first foreign language, I had no idea where to start or what approach was best for me.

Greek and Hebrew were ultimately responsible for turning me from an absolute failure to a confident polyglot and an academic success story, as it was through loads of trial and error that I learned a lot about myself.

This I’ll never forget.

One day I was reading through and exegeting parts of Ecclesiastes (